- [Man] This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota, Florida This Week is made possible in part by support from the Tampa Bay Times (upbeat music) - [Rob] Coming up next, the number of COVID-19 cases in Florida rises but deaths are dropping.

The state legislature moves to put limits on voting news reports indicate that North Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz is under investigation over his alleged sexual relationship with the juvenile.

And the passing of a radio icon all coming up on Florida This week.

(upbeat music) - Welcome back, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis boasts that the state is furthest along in the country and reopening society and welcoming tourists but some top scientists are warning that the virus is still not completely under control.

- [Reporter] The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Florida has been steadily rising.

So hospitalizations and deaths are down.

The daily average of new cases is now higher than it was two weeks ago.

Several media outlets reported this week that Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz of North Florida is being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department.

Gaetz denies any criminal wrongdoing.

The reports are that Gaetz is accused of having a sexual relationship with a 17 year old girl and paying for her to travel with him and is under investigation to determine if he violated federal sex trafficking laws.

A national conservative group The Heritage Foundation is pushing the state legislature to change Florida's election laws.

There's already a bill HB 7041 that would restrict the use of Dropboxes, require more extensive use of photo IDs for people voting by mail and make it easier for partisans to challenge voters signatures.

This week is the George Floyd murder trial got underway in Minnesota, a person who lit the fire and burned down a North Campus Strip Mall during last year's protests over the Floyd killing pled guilty to Federal Arson Charges.

He could serve as many as 20 years in prison.

And also this week, longtime Tampa radio personality, Ted Webb died.

Webb was part of the Conservative Warning Team on WFLA-AM, who started his career in radio more than 50 years ago as a teenager, Ted was a former panelist on this program.

And while he held strong opinions, he could be charming and funny and he was always entertaining.

Ted Webb was 72 years old.

- The state legislature is moving to limit voting by mail and make other changes to election laws.

House Bill 7041 in the legislature creates new provisions for voting in Florida, including making it illegal to hand out food and water to voters who are standing in line within 150 feet of a polling place.

State representative Blaise Ingoglia is sponsors the bill and represents Florida's 35th district which includes Spring Hill and Brooksville and Hernando County.

Previously, he was the chair of the Republican party of Florida from 2015 to 2019 and representative Ingoglia welcome back to Florida This Week, good to see you.

- Good to see you, Rob.

- So my first question is by making it a little bit more difficult to vote in Florida what problem are you hoping to solve?

- Well, look, the first thing I wanna say is that voting in Florida is very, very easy.

You have up to 45 days of voting in Florida.

You have three different ways of voting in Florida but what a lot of this boils down to is that when you go to vote in the polls there are a lot of safeguards but there is hardly if any safeguards, when you vote by mail and what we're doing is we're proposing some very common sense solutions to make sure that we are putting those guardrails and putting them around vote by mail.

- Have there been documented problems of people voting illegally by mail here in Florida, widespread problems?

- Yeah, well, they have over the years, I think from 2010 to 2015, there have been 20 people who've been arrested.

There was a grand jury that convened in Miami and one of their recommendations was to make sure that we get rid of ballot harvesting because they said that was a big problem.

And that's one of the things that we're trying to do in this bill is eliminate ballot harvesting.

And there has even been a race that is an overturned because of fraud because of people taking vote by mail ballots and then forging signatures.

So, this isn't an isolated problem, but look, our job is to make sure that we have the safest securest election that we can in the State of Florida while still maintaining access to the ballot box.

And I think that legislation does that - As I've covered elections, I've seen long voter lines in some parts of the Tampa Bay area and I'm wondering how do we achieve a better democracy by saying to people that are working at the polls.

You can't hand out water or food to people that are standing in a long line close to the polls.

- Well, so the first thing is where I think you need to understand that that law is already on the books.

It's already on the books saying that you cannot solicit anybody online within 100 feet.

We're moving that to 150 feet.

But the arguments saying that we're denying people water and food is just absolutely disingenuous.

In fact, it's laughable because here's why is that you can be outside the 150 foot buffer zone.

You can hand out water, you can hand out food.

All we're saying is that you cannot bother somebody while they're in line within the 150 feet.

Now there's nothing preventing people from going and taking the food outside of the 150 foot line and bringing it in on line.

And there's nothing preventing supervisors of elections from handing out water.

So it's a disingenuous argument.

It's a little frustrating 'cause they're mischaracterizing what is in the bill and what is in current law.

- I mentioned at the top of the show that The Heritage Foundation is sponsoring this bill and similar bills, or at least has suggested language for this bill and similar bills across the country.

In Georgia, they say that a bill like this is a voter suppression.

What do you say to them?

- Well, first of all, The Heritage Foundation is not contact, it may with any language for this bill.

Obviously, you know that I've been party chair and I've been watching elections.

I run elections, including my own, and I'm just putting into a statute to fix some of the problems ongoing problems that that we've seen in the state of Florida.

So, but as far as voter suppression, that's laughable.

Like I said at the top of the show, when I first came on, you have up to 45 days of voting.

Three different ways of voting, vote by mail, you can vote early at the polls, you can vote early at your precinct.

Anyone who says we're suppressing anybody's votes, clearly isn't paying attention to what's going on here in the State of Florida - Representative one last question that is the legislature is moving to get people who purchase items online to make sure that the state sales tax is paid.

Will that benefit the state coffers or how will the revenue be used that's collected if this bill passes?

- Yeah and I expect the bill to be passed Speaker Sprowls and President Simpson have already sort of agreed in the framework.

This is a big deal in Florida.

We've always viewed it as a collection issue.

It was money that should have been collected before but now we have to have legislation through the Wayfair decision, a court decision where we now are gonna start collecting it.

But what we do with the money, I think is the big thing here.

So businesses, especially small businesses are going to get crushed with up to a 700% tax increase for their unemployment taxes to refill the coffers that were used because of the pandemic.

We are going to backfill that and make that solvent.

It will take about four and a half years to do so.

And then after that we're taking the money and we are reducing the business rent tax.

We are one of the few states in the nation that still has a business rent tax where reducing it from five and a half to 2%.

So what does this mean?

This means that Florida will remain the number one destination for businesses.

We are helping our small businesses get off of their feet, while we're getting through this pandemic and it's just another reason why everyone wants to move to Florida.

Our unemployment rate is 4.7%.

Now it's one of the lowest in the nation, we're recovering quicker and this piece of legislation will be a supercharge for small business - Representative Ingoglia thanks for coming on this program.

- My pleasure have a great day Rob.

(upbeat music) - House Bill one is legislation designed to crack down on violent protests here in Florida, the controversial bill has prompted a strong debate in Tallahassee and across the state.

Fentrice Driskell represents Florida's 63rd House District which includes parts of Tampa and Hillsborough County.

She's an attorney with Carlton Fields.

Fentrice Driskell.

Thanks for coming on Florida This Week.

Great to see you.

- Hi Rob, great to see you too.

Thank you for having me.

- The backers of HB1s have been saying continuously since this debate started that they don't want Florida to have the same kind of problems that we've seen in Portland or Seattle.

They say we need more laws against protesting to keep down the kind of violence they say was out on the West coast.

Do we need more laws governing protests?

- No, we don't and what's interesting is that those same proponents Chief among them Governor Ron DeSantis, last summer in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protest, he went on record saying that we don't have those problems in Florida.

And we know that studies show that over 90% of protests nationwide that occurred in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and the killing of too many unarmed black people to name.

Those protests over 90% of them nationally were considered nonviolent or peaceful.

We know that we had a couple of issues in Florida but not widespread mass violence.

And we also know that law enforcement was well-equipped with laws that are already on the book to try to tamp out any bad actors and make sure that, you know the laws are being enforced in protecting people's safety their personal safety and their property.

So HB1 just adds a litany of new criminal offenses that are unnecessary.

- This law would make felonies applied to anybody who took part in a crowded protest where one person in that crowd committed a felony, everybody in the crowd would be charged with the same felony and that would apply not just the Black Lives Matter protesters that would apply to Capitol Hill protestors or anti-abortion protesters as well.

- That's right and I'm so glad that you brought that up.

That's why this bill is so very bad.

It threatens the first amendment rights for all of us and, you know, sure.

Maybe there are in the mix of those different protests that you name, maybe there's one or two that you don't like, but you have to think about your own personal course, your own personal freedoms and liberties.

The first amendment right is to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly is there for us all to enjoy and we are concerned with the passage of HB1.

It will have a chilling effect on protesters and look, I wanna be very clear.

This bill was first referenced by the governor in September of 2020 at the height of the protest around Black Lives Matter.

The bill itself was filed on January 6th purportedly under the guise that it was designed to help stop incidents like the violent insurrection that occurred at the nation's Capitol.

But what has remained clear through all of this is that this is a bill that is designed to take aim at those who would protest racial injustice and you know, it's just so unfortunate that in 2021, we're still dealing with racial injustice but to the extent that we are, we certainly have the right to civil disobedience and to use peaceful protests to try to move our country in the right direction.

- Let me ask you about voting.

There's an effort to make it harder to vote by mail here in Florida.

What's your position on that?

And what do you think the aim of the backers is?

- You know, again I'm concerned about the hypocrisy whereas we had the 2020 election and we had, you know, our Secretary of State applauding the job that our supervisors of elections did, we had our governor praising how well we'd done in the election.

And it was something to be proud of.

I mean, look, we all remember the fiasco of the 2000 election here in Florida and we should celebrate how far we've come.

But now we see these new voting rights bills And you know, it seems to me that Florida is trying to be a part of this national trend with Republican led legislatures of introducing legislation that will make it more difficult to vote by mail.

After the success of voting by mail in the 2020 election, there have been no reports of widespread fraud in Florida frankly, no reports of fraud other than what I've read that happened, unfortunately down in a State Senate race down in Miami where a former Senator Frank Artiles was involved in putting a shadow candidate in a race.

But you know, other than that, I've not heard of any reports of fraud and so these election laws seem to be unnecessary.

It's so bad that Senate Bill 90 if I could just mention this one for a second would make it such that even if you are registered to vote by mail currently in the next election, once this bill passes and takes effect you would have to re-register to vote by mail.

So it is such an inconvenience to the people and we really should be listening to our bi-partisan supervisors of elections who were telling us that we don't need these new laws.

- And we only have 20 seconds, but Republicans say, look we wanna head off future problems.

We've had a good pass but we wanna anticipate problems in the future and that's what we're trying to do in 15 seconds.

How would you answer that?

- I would say that we need to pay attention to what's happening nationally.

And if you look at Georgia and you look at that Draconian voter rights, well excuse me elections restrictions law that was just passed.

And you see the response of corporate America over 72 black executives just signed onto a letter in the New York Times encouraging corporate America to step up.

We don't want that problem in Florida and therefore we should not be pursuing these bills - Representative Fentrice Driskell, thanks for coming back on Florida This Week.

Good to see.

- Thank you.

(upbeat music) - Sharon Calvert is a long time government watchdog and a Republican and Tea party activist and is a blogger for "Eye on Tampa Bay", Sharon Calvert, welcome back to Florida This Week.

Thanks for coming on the program.

- Thanks for having me Rob.

- Few weeks ago, the Florida Supreme court struck down Hillsborough's transportation tax and now the Hillsborough County has to decide what to do with about a half billion dollars of money collected over the life of the tax.

I've heard some people suggest that we ought to just lower the sales tax in Hillsborough County temporarily until that $500 million is eaten up.

What do you think about that idea?

- Well, that's obviously one solution though.

I do believe that people would prefer if at all possible to get that money back into their pockets especially at a time when so many are struggling but that said that may be more complicated and a more simpler solution, which is fair and equitable I believe is one that would provide a tax holiday and take the tax back down to six and a half percent until that over half a billion dollars is used up that was taken out of the local economy.

- Sharon, you were an opponent of that tax.

Now the Hillsborough County Commission looks like it's aiming to put a similar tax back on before voters next year.

Will you oppose that tax if it goes on the ballot?

- Well, of course we don't exactly know what it may be but they offer transportation who actually were the perpetrators of putting the unlawful tax hike on the ballot in 2018.

Once, you know, they're All for Transportation to that O to be put back on the 2022 ballot.

I will certainly oppose that we're going through paradigm shifts with the pandemic with regards to where people work?

Where they live?

Their traffic patterns?

So thinking about attacks especially another $16 billion tax I think people don't have that.

I think they have a sour taste for pursuing that kind of tax.

- The leaders of All for Transportation say it's because of activists like you and the members of the Hillsborough County Commission that ignored Hillsborough's growing transportation problems that they had to do something.

And you know, I know as a commuter the traffic is almost as bad as it was before the crisis.

So even though a lot of people are working from home the roads are crowded out there.

- Well, that's true.

But also back in 2018, it was unfortunate that the public wasn't well-informed and wasn't reported that there was a ten-year transportation funding plan 812 million that was already in place because All for Transportation was allowed to just go out there and basically falsely state they're the only transportation plan in town and that was wrong.

In addition, there was another plan put before the County commission and put before the Financial Director and the Budget Director of the County by Dr. Jim Davidson, that would be able to fund transportation without a tax hike.

So they are not the only transportation plan in town.

We need a robust discussion about it in the sunshine, not behind closed doors like before, and again, we're in a paradigm shift.

So let's kind of see what happens before we tie taxpayers hands for decades with a tax.

- Sharon, you're a grassroots activist and you've had some success and I'm wondering what you think about Tallahassee over the last few years, gradually taking more and more power away from local government, city government and County government.

They preempted local laws on everything from trees.

They wanted a preempt local laws about cruise ships and, and police budgets and this year they're doing even more of that.

Wondering as a local activist, what do you think about Tallahassee's preemption of local government?

- Well, I mean, you're kind of making a broad statement and what we have found, I mean, look at All for Transportation we were just talking about it.

That was pretty much an abusive using that tax referendum.

So, those things need to be reined in if there's abuse.

What I have seen in some of these bills is it's not that you're taking control but you're putting in transparency and accountability.

I mean, when you're forcing audits to be done, reports you know, need to be filed, putting it out for people to see, where's the money coming from?

Where's it going?

I'm not so sure that it's always taking control.

I think that's something that's very misleading when that kind of broad statement is always being used and in some of the bills that we see today, I believe are just trying to reign in some things that have kind of gotten out of hand at the local level.

- All right, Sharon Calvert, thanks for coming back on the program.

- Thank you, Rob happy... (upbeat music) - Lucinda Johnston is the newly elected Chair of the Pinellas County Democratic Executive Committee.

She's a retired School Administrator and Educator and she joins us now Lucinda, welcome to Florida This Week.

- Thank you, thank you, my pleasure.

- Let me start by asking you about the governor.

The governor was in Pinellas County this week and he is saying that he'd like to see teachers rewarded with a thousand dollar bonus in the coming fiscal year.

The Florida Education Association came out this week and said they would rather not just see teachers rewarded but they'd also like to see school employees rewarded.

What did you think about the governor's proposal?

- I think the governor's proposal to give a thousand dollars to teachers, I mean, that's a wonderful gesture.

I would have liked to have seen him protect their health from the beginning of this pandemic which I thought was crucial and he's push to reopen schools before teachers were ready, I thought was just horrible and there are a lot about moving parts in a school, there's bookkeepers, there are secretaries, custodians, lunchroom ladies who have daily contact with people, lunchroom aides who sit and eat lunch with children.

And I believe everyone that works in a school deserves some kind of bonus that the teachers certainly I'm not saying that they don't deserve it, but everyone in a school deserved that we couldn't open the school if it weren't for them.

- You mentioned he opened the schools too quickly.

I mean, can you point to numbers that show that some of the teachers have been made ill by their exposure to people who might be sick in the school since the schools have reopened?

- I wish I could, but I know that there have been some in Pinellas County and the other part of that was the way that they handled students who tested positive or had siblings who tested positive and there was absolutely no contact tracing, no ability to keep siblings of children who had tested positive from attending school.

It was just a lot of policy that I felt like in the teachers that I still associate with felt like you know, endangering people.

- We've been talking a lot on this program about the bills to make it harder to vote by mail in the State of Florida, we had a state representative on earlier who's backing the bill and he says this is not a major change.

And it's really not gonna affect or reduce the number of people who were voting.

I'm wondering what your thoughts are about these potential changes to voting here in Florida?

- Well, life is busy and the biggest part of this bill that troubles me is that people who are now expecting to get a ballot, they won't get a ballot unless they asked for one.

And the responsibility of notifying people of that's gonna be on our Supervisors of Elections at a County level who have all, you know, almost all of them have objective to that.

Even ours here in Pinellas County, who is a Republican and who does a fine job by the way.

But when people are expecting a bill, I mean, a ballot, they don't want to have to request that ballot again.

They think they're getting it through the 2020 election.

So that's my feelings on it.

I also think that, I know Senator Baxley dismissed it and defended it and said it would probably invigorate people.

And it's certainly invigorating Democrats 'cause our phones are blowing up and our emails to volunteer to get out on the streets and knock on doors and make calls to make sure people know that they have to request that ballot.

So he has certainly invigorated Democrats.

I don't know if that was his intention.

- I looked up the numbers and we only have about 40 seconds left but 55% of seniors vote by mail.

A lot of seniors in the 2020 election used the mailing system to vote.

When we hear people say, it's not gonna tamp down the vote, what do you think?

- I believe it is?

And I believe it's an attack on our seniors and the other part about the bill is that you can't collect for people now, you used to be able to collect ballots and take them to the Supervisors of Elections Office as long as you had permission from the people that did and not being able to do that, it's gonna be very harmful to seniors who can't drive and don't trust a mail.

I always deliver mine because I just wanna make sure it gets there, so.

- Well, Lucinda Johnston thanks a lot, thanks for coming on the program.

- Thank you so much, I enjoyed it.

(upbeat music) - Well, finally, singer Jackson Browne is known for his advocacy on behalf of human rights, the environment and the arts.

The crisis on the Mexican border inspired him to write this new song, "The dreamer."

Stay safe, we'll see you next week.

(singing in foreign language) (upbeat music) - [Man] Florida This Week is a production of WEDU, who is solely responsible for its content.